Immortality in Fiction - Spiritual

Spiritual

There are numerous works of fantasy fiction dealing with spiritual immortality in the form of reincarnation or a world of the dead. The novel What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson and the Tim Burton film Beetlejuice have heroes who are forced to explore such worlds after their untimely deaths.

In the book Thursday's fictions by Richard James Allen, the character Thursday tries to cheat the cycle of reincarnation to achieve a form of serial immortality - by rediscovering who she is each time she comes back to life in a different body. Her actions create havoc for herself and all the characters in the story and when her son is offered eternal life at the end of the tale he turns it down in favor of living in the moment.

In the roleplaying game Wraith: The Oblivion, published by White Wolf Publishing, Inc., the afterlife is place known as the Underworld, where certain people who die enter as ghosts, emotionally bound to their former lives. Many are unhappy with their eternal existences and either become insane Spectres or ossify into statues. Originally, the Underworld was a place where the dead stayed until they reached transcendence, but the notion was later considered heretical by the Hierarchy.

In the game Soul Calibur III the final boss of the game Zasalamel (ultimate form “Abyss”) was a member of an ancient Egyptian tribe that guarded the mythical Soul Calibur. Being a genius among his tribe he mastered the forbidden art of reincarnation, so every time he would die he would be reincarnated. But every time he died began a fury of unimaginable and incomprehensible pain of his body and his soul until he was completely born again. After thousands upon thousands of years of being subjected to this pain he simply wanted to die. In a way he was actually forced to hate death through Pavlov’s theory of classical conditioning. Knowing that there he had gained so much power that he becomes even more powerful than the sword known as Soul Calibur and its evil counterpart Soul Edge, he formed a master plan that would lead to his death. Thus he gave the evil sword, Soul Edge, a body so that it could feast upon human souls until it was powerful enough to merge with Soul Calibur to break his curse.

One of the central concepts of the science fiction miniatures game Warhammer 40,000 is a place called the Warp. It is more officially called the Immaterium because it is a purely spiritual place that is dominated by thought and lacking the material nature of the real world. In the game it allows travel faster than light, but it is also a place where a mind can continue to exist after death. Alien races and gifted humans are even described as being able to return to life after death by manipulating the warp, especially the humans called Psykers and an alien the race called the Eldar.

In Star Wars, Jedi are shown to have mastered a form of immortality by passing into the Force upon their deaths, becoming Force 'ghosts' who can communicate with the living. It has been stated by Qui-Gon Jinn that this ability can only be achieved through compassion and the release of one's self; although Sith have achieved a similar state, this commonly features them being bound to a specific object, eventually driven insane from the loneliness and rage as they wait for a chance to return to life.